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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6496423" data-attributes="member: 42582">My view on this is similar, though perhaps not identical, to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s.Key words in the passage I've quoted are "success", "responsible" and "professional".I can think of two basic ways of approaching those terms.One is from the literary/artistic perspective. But from this perspective, canon is not always going to be a number one priority. Hussar gives some reasons why not. So did Ryan Dancey in the early days of WotC's takeover of TSR:From: "Ryan S. Dancey" <ryand@frpg.com> Newsgroups: RPG.DnD.Greyhawk Subject: What is and is not Cannon Date: Sun, 26 Dec 1999 17:45:00 Message-ID: <96229@cipher.wizards.com> Lines: 167 . . . For a long time, there was an effort to have "one cannon".  That is, to assume that all facts published by TSR were to be considered parts of a larger whole.  When those facts contravened themselves, a convoluted logic tree was built to explain the discrepencies. . . . Starting with 3e, we are changing our definiton of cannon.  We are going to be moving to an idea called "core continuity". . . . No deviation from that material will be acceptable - all facts must check with the core continuitity. . . . Over time, we will advance the core continuity. . . . The core continuity material is not encyclopedic.  We are not going to go through every published product, extract every fact, try to create logical explanations for all the discrepencies, then ask designers to adhere to that mass of data.  The "core continuity" will be much smaller - an abstract of the total data, hitting just the most important features. . . . First, the amount of knowledge that will be considered "cannon" has to be of a reasonably minimal size.  It is simply impossible to keep every piece of fact accurate and checked when the volume of such material expands to the size of something like one of our popular campaign worlds. . . . Second, there is a lot of data that contradicts itself. . . . Third, some of the material produced for our worlds is crap.  Pulling no punches, not every word written under the banner of a D&D world logo is suitable for print or should ever have been published.  Rather than hold our noses and pretend that such material is signficant, we're going to simply pretend that it does not exist and stop trying to patch it up or fix it.The other relevant perspective is a commercial one. I don't know of any evidence that pettifogging over canon is an important factor in commercial success for a professional publisher of fantasy stories or fantasy RPG material.A comparable medium is superhero comics, and these don't slavishly adhere to canon. Sometimes this is because it is  irrelevant from the internal, artisitic point of view and rather is a factor of what, in gaming, would be called a metagame consideration - for instance, changes of season, of fashion, or technology, etc that correspond to the real world circumstances in which the comics are published. This can even extend to aspects of character biography, such as which war Prof X fought in (originally Korea, but that would no longer make sense for a character who is middle-aged in 2015 - such a character would not have been born when the Korean War was fought).Even the X-Men movies don't maintain perfect continuity between themselves, but I don't know of any evidence that this hurts their commercial success.Is there any reason for thinking that less-than-100% canon compliance is a factor in the commercial success of Tyranny of Dragons? I haven't seen anyone post any, but I haven't read every post in every thread.</blockquote>

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